The Literary Psychogeography of London

The Literary Psychogeography of London PDF Author: Ann Tso
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030529800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.

The Literary Psychogeography of London

The Literary Psychogeography of London PDF Author: Ann Tso
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030529800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description
This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.

A Horror and a Beauty: The World of Peter Ackroyd's London Novels

A Horror and a Beauty: The World of Peter Ackroyd's London Novels PDF Author: Petr Chalupský
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN: 802463161X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Peter Ackroyd is one of the foremost contemporary British “London writers”. He focuses on the capital, its history, development and identity, both in his fiction and non-fiction. The London of his novels is thus a highly idiosyncratic construct which reflects and derives from its author’s ideas about the actual city’s nature as well as his concept of the English literary sensibility in general as he outlines them in his lectures and historical and literary studies. It is an exceptionally heterogeneous city of enormous diversity and richness of human experience, moods and emotion, of actions and events, and also of the tools through which these are (re)presented and reenacted. According to Ackroyd, this heterogeneity mostly originates outside the sites and domains of the established or mainstream cultural production and social norms and conventions, particularly in occult practices, subversive acts and the plotting of radical individuals or groups, criminal and fraudulent activities of various kinds, dubious scientific experiments, and the popular dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment whose permanent encounters with and contesting of the officially approved and prescribed forms instigate the city’s vitalising energy for dynamic change and spiritual renewal. This book presents the world of Ackroyd’s London novels as a distinct chronotope determined by specific spatial and temporal properties and their mutual interconnectedness. Although such a concept of urban space in its essence defies categorisation, the book is thematically organised around six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between its past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants’ psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

London Under

London Under PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385531516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
In this vividly descriptive short study, Peter Ackroyd tunnels down through the geological layers of London, meeting the creatures that dwell in darkness and excavating the lore and mythology beneath the surface. There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. To go under London is to penetrate history, and Ackroyd's book is filled with the stories unique to this underworld: the hydraulic device used to lower bodies into the catacombs in Kensal Green cemetery; the door in the plinth of the statue of Boadicea on Westminster Bridge that leads to a huge tunnel packed with cables for gas, water, and telephone; the sulphurous fumes on the Underground's Metropolitan Line. Highly imaginative and delightfully entertaining, London Under is Ackroyd at his best.

London in Contemporary British Fiction

London in Contemporary British Fiction PDF Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1623560616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J.G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been registering the changes to the social and cultural London landscape for years. This volume brings together their vivid representations of the capital. Uniting the readings are themes such as relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the 'real London'; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London's unconsciousness and the suburbs as the frontier of the future. The volume creates a framework for new approaches to the representation of London required by the unprecedented social uncertainties of recent years: an invaluable contribution to studies of contemporary writing about London.

The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton

The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton PDF Author: Arya Aryan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527584976
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
This book explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It argues that postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, but hetero-referential, consciously revealing the paradoxes of self-referentiality while simultaneously creating a heterocosmic world where the text is capable of referring to an external reality. The book highlights Chatterton’s narrative strategies and techniques which result in revealing the text’s meaning-granting process. The novel acknowledges the existence of reality and the text’s possibility of representation, but contends that reality is a human construct. In addition, the book demonstrates that representation is possible through fictive referents, and thus hetero-referential.

Queer City

Queer City PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683353013
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
A history of the development of London as a European epicenter of queer life. In Queer City, the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way–through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population. In Roman Londinium, the city was dotted with lupanaria (“wolf dens” or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels), and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks, and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music, and the horror of AIDS. Ackroyd reveals the hidden story of London, with its diversity, thrills, and energy, as well as its terrors, dangers, and risks, and in doing so, explains the origins of all English-speaking gay culture. Praise for Queer City “Spanning centuries, the book is a fantastically researched project that is obviously close to the author’s heart.... An exciting look at London’s queer history and a tribute to the “various human worlds maintained in [the city’s] diversity despite persecution, condemnation, and affliction.””—Kirkus Reviews “[Ackroyd’s] work is highly anecdotal and near encyclopedic . . . the book is fascinating in its careful exposition of the singularities—and commonalities—of gay life, both male and female. Ultimately it is, as he concludes, a celebration as well as a history,” —Booklist “A witty history-cum-tribute to gay London, from the Roman “wolf dens” through Oscar Wilde and Gay Pride marches to the present day,” —ShelfAwareness

Hawksmoor

Hawksmoor PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN: 9780241965481
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe.' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . Cover art by: Barn'whether the book addresses graffiti explicitly, evoke a city from the past, or are considered cult classics, the novels all share the quality - like street art - of speaking to their time.' Guardian Gallery

English Music

English Music PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140169416
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description


Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin PDF Author: Peter Ackroyd
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
ISBN: 0385537387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A brief yet definitive new biography of one of film's greatest legends: perfect for readers who want to know more about the iconic star but who don't want to commit to a lengthy work. He was the very first icon of the silver screen and is one of the most recognizable of Hollywood faces, even a hundred years after his first film. But what of the man behind the moustache? Peter Ackroyd's new biography turns the spotlight on Chaplin's life as well as his work, from his humble theatrical beginnings in music halls to winning an honorary Academy Award. Everything is here, from the glamor of his golden age to the murky scandals of the 1940s and eventual exile to Switzerland. There are charming anecdotes along the way: playing the violin in a New York hotel room to mask the sound of Stan Laurel frying pork chops and long Hollywood lunches with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. This masterful brief biography offers fresh revelations about one of the most familiar faces of the last century and brings the Little Tramp vividly to life.

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature PDF Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136777881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.